This is more like it. I had despaired of Sarah Kane's Blasted. Now Graeae's shock-fuelled, text-centric production admirably displays the work's virtues, confronting us with nastiness after atrocity, until we are left washed out, touched and thrillingly appalled.
Last October, seeing this play for the first time, I was left brain-dead by an expensive, slow, reverential German production at the Barbican that was duller than sausage water.
Disabled company Graeae is differently reverential. Every word of Kane's play, including stage directions, is spoken on stage, at first by a writer's voice which could, disturbingly, be Kane from beyond the grave, then by the actors themselves.
It brings more urgency to this aggressively surreal play, in which one-time lovers Ian and Cate sexually assault each other in a hotel room, before a soldier and a mortar bomb blow them into a horrific world of militarised rape and violence. Awful actions (rape, eyes being bitten out) come with more impact, the power of the words outdoing the tepid mimes.
Their effect, and that of the senseless racism and sexual hatred rampant in Kane's dialogue, mounts. Disability on display increases our discomfort. Amputee David Toole's soldier whirls around the stage on his hands, and, called upon to rape Gerard McDermott's Ian, pulls out his vestigial leg as if it were a phallus.
Yet there is humour in the piece. The debris-strewn end leaves Ian and Cate, two very limited people, bickering over a dead baby like an old couple. Such banality in the face of such relentlessly conjured awfulness, and Kane's imagery, recalls Beckett. Surprisingly, though, the play's final note of sympathy offers something he never did: hope.
Until 3 February (0870 429 6883, www.sohotheatre.com).
Blasted
Soho Theatre
Dean Street, W1D 3NE
